Exclusive: Google App Engine ported to Amazon's EC2 — One of the biggest criticisms of Google's App Engine have been cries of lock-in, that the applications developed for the platform won't be portable to any other service. This weekend, Chris Anderson, the Portland-based cofounder …

Is Google App Engine a Lock-in Play? — Venture capitalist Brad Feld just put up an intriguing post comparing Google App Engine to Amazon EC2. The meat of the entry is from an analysis by Brad's friend Scott Moody. Here are the juiciest bits, pro and con: … This last point is really very serious.

Company claims to sell Mac clone for $399 — Source: Psytar (at least until Apple Legal has their morning coffee) — Personal technology enthusiasts yearning for the Mac Experience without the Apple Tax—that huge markup that Mac users pay for off-the-shelf PC hardware with OS X—your days of gnashing teeth may be over.

Yahoo! Slurp 3.0 — Over the past few weeks, we've been preparing for the latest version of the Yahoo! Search crawler with some infrastructure updates, which recently caused a variance in our crawl behavior. — With everything now in place, the rollout has officially begun.

Content Is Becoming a Commodity — Over the weekend, it seemed that everyone in the tech blogosphere contributed to the discussion around fractured blog comments; Robert Scoble even went so far as to say that the “era of blogger's control” is over. What all these discussions hinged …

Blockbuster Proposes Combination With Circuit City — Blockbuster Inc. (NYSE: BBI) today announced that it has offered to acquire Circuit City Stores, Inc. (NYSE: CC) for at least $6.00 per share in cash, subject to due diligence. The offer was made in a letter sent to Circuit City Chairman …

Latest iPhone Firmware Saves Pictures from Safari — At last! The latest beta version of Apple's iPhone 1.2.0 firmware gives you the possibility of saving pictures straight from Safari and into the Photo Album. We tried and it works: just hold your finger against an image for a longer …

The end of Mowser — It's been a year since I launched Mowser at April 2007's Mobile Monday, so it's time for a progress report. Sadly, the news isn't good. — Mowser is at the end of its life in its current form. We haven't been able to raise funding, and as a site …

TwitLinks: Not Useful, Not A TechMeme Killer — It's clear that Twitter is the place that a lot of news breaks first (example), hours before blogs and days before mainstream media. No one has created an application yet that harvests that information and presents it as breaking news …

Another Windows veteran to leave Microsoft — Will Poole, a Microsoft Windows veteran — and most recently, Corporate Vice President in charge of the company's Unlimited Potential group — is retiring, according to sources who asked not to be named. — Poole, who has been at Microsoft 12 years …

Google tech to help fight child pornography — After a long silence from Google on the kids front, the search giant is now regularly raising its hand to help children's advocates on the Internet. — Google said Monday that it has built custom video and image search technology …

Hitwise: Google Hits New High; Microsoft & Yahoo New Lows — Last week, Hitwise released the latest statistics for search engine share in the United States for March 2008, showing Google at an all-time high while Microsoft and Yahoo hit all-time lows. — The four major search engines stack up as follows:

Google XSS — Now, normally when I find an XSS vulnerability on a popular domain I just report it to the appropriate security team and move on, but this one is interesting... By taking advantage of the content-type returned by spreadsheets.google.com (and a caching flaw on the part of Google) …

Google mapping spec now an industry standard — Members of an industry group called the Open Geospatial Consortium have approved Google's KML technology as an open standard for describing some geographic data. — KML is used to manage the display of geospatial information in Google Earth …